Return to Our Work

The Peggy Notebaert Nature Center
The Sustainability Center

Education | Museum | Nature/Cultural Center

“OUR SURVIVAL RELIES ON EARTH’S RESOURCES,” reads text at the entry to the new Sustainability Center at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Center (PNNC). Opened in the fall of 2023, PNNC’s new 1,100 square foot Sustainability Center combines interactive exhibits and a resource center to encourage visitors to better understand how urban sustainability and environmental conservation issues impact the life-sustaining balance of our natural world.The exhibition was created for visitors who care about sustainability and want to do something but may need some help getting started. Balance Studios developed media and a series of touch interactives that serve as a personal call to action to help “demystify” sustainability science for visitors and help them learn about how their efforts can make positive changes in their community.

Intro Kiosk

When they enter the Sustainability Center, visitors interact with a touch screen experience that allows them to create a personalized “Passport” that will activate other experiences throughout the exhibition. Through a series of simple onscreen prompts, visitors create their digital Passport with their photo and a QR code. As they use the QR code to engage other digital activities throughout the exhibition, the Passport captures useful information about their engagements in the exhibition for easy follow-up later. Visitors are delighted to take control over their experience when they encounter content auto-loaded by the content management system that they can read, save and share.

Globe

A seven-foot diameter, 360-degree illuminated globe (one of the largest in North America) hangs in the main room of the Sustainability Center, providing dynamic images of Earth weather patterns and demonstrating the impact of climate change on our planet. Balance Studios created a web-based content management system that places faces of visitors captured for their exhibition “Passport” onto the rotating globe, providing a fun and personalized experience. Hey, is that Aunt Mildred up on that giant, rotating globe?

Mini Movies

Balance Studios produced a series of short videos for the exhibition focusing on four sustainability topics: Food, Water, Energy and Culture/Economy. Voiced by young people, each video highlights a sustainability challenge to be addressed (“food requires a great deal of natural resources to produce”) and suggests common-sense activities that visitors can undertake to help make our world more sustainable (“sustainable farming practices preserve and even restore water and soil resources”). The enthusiasm and youthful innocence of the narrators combined with clever animations and lively background music gives visitors the feeling that these young narrators are speaking to them directly from their own future.

After viewing each video, visitors have the opportunity to make a personal commitment to their own sustainable future by making a series of onscreen pledges (“I will buy seasonal produce to reduce the distance my food has to travel to get to me”). Balance developed a web-based content management system that links visitor personal pledges with related reading material they can access later in the exhibition. The CMS also allows for easy online updating of pledge content on four touch screens.

Digital Bookshelf

Moving into the resource center area of the exhibition visitors have opportunities to delve more deeply into the challenges and opportunities of sustainability. The resource center space features a series of physical and touch screen digital bookcases surrounding comfortable seating and tables that encourage visitors to settle in and learn more.

Balance Studios developed a series of touch screen interactives that allow visitors to access a series of digital books and PDFs addressing specific elements of sustainability science. By touching the screen (or logging in using their Passport QR code), visitors can open and read onscreen content with titles such as The Water Crisis in American and Problems with Palm Oil.

For visitors who use their exhibition Passport to activate the digital library, it will include personalized topics suggested from previous visitor interactions in the exhibition. That’s a smart interactive experience!

Not enough time to complete your read of a compelling title while at the exhibition—no problem! The online content management system we created allows visitors to save/share content via email to explore later at home. The CMS also allows for easy updating of all content in the Digital Bookshelf.

C3/Chicago Conservation Corps

The resource area of the exhibition includes an engaging touch interactive experience about the Chicago Conservation Corps (C3), a local advocacy group now based at the Sustainability Center. With the motto of “You want to do something. We can help,” C3 collaborates with partners across the city of Chicago to inspire and fund lasting sustainability efforts.

We developed the touch screen experience to introduce visitors to C3 conservation success stories and provide information about the C3 Leader Program and the C3 Ambassador program. Visitors are inspired by success stories of grassroots community action by everyday Chicagoans who spark lasting change in local communities. The experience also provides opportunities for visitors to connect with CS including sign up for C3 email updates, accessing the C3 Facebook and Instagram sites, and even signing up to be a C3 Leader.

What learning engagement would be complete without a test? The C3 touch interactive also includes a series of quizzes that challenge visitors to test their knowledge of sustainability issues across the four main topics of the exhibition: Food, Water, Energy and Culture/Economy. Learn, connect, and test your knowledge—the CS interactive has it all!

The Idea

Create a series of digital experiences for young people and adults that raise awareness about the importance of sustainable living and empower people with hands-on tools to make a positive impact on the environment. Use immersive storytelling to engage an audience who can sometimes feel overwhelmed when it comes to topics of sustainability and climate change. Encourage audiences to think more about improving our planet’s health.

Services

Our team created a series of robust, entertaining digital activities that help the Sustainability Center function as a community hub for visitors of all ages to discover up-to-date sustainability practices and technologies. We implemented a series of web-based content management systems that allowed visitors to engage with personalized experiences keyed to their interests to help make the experience unique, fun, and memorable for every visitor. The custom CMS we created also allows for easy updating of content across a variety of digital experiences.

The Result

The experiences we created for the Sustainability Center help visitors to engage a wide range of information and resources about sustainability science in ways that create personal, meaningful connections that encourage involvement in a variety of Chicago-based environmental initiatives. Fun and compelling graphics, videos and quizzes advance the key messages of the exhibition in ways that connect with all visitors to the experience.

The Peggy Notebaert Nature CenterThe Sustainability Center